Another Labour Day weekend

This blog post carries on a 'tradition' that lasted over 40 years. For many years I wrote a family letter during the Labour Day weekend, that was a sort of 'status report', because this weekend marked the end of the allegedly relaxed summer and the beginning of another academic year with new groups of students, new courses, and cooler weather. This year we have the last of these with emphasis - it's been another hot week with temperatures in the 30s and high humidity, and then right on schedule, just as the weather forecaster said it would, a front came through around 6 pm on Friday with thunder, lightning, high winds and heavy rain; and the temperature on our balcony dropped nearly 10 C in 20 minutes or so, from the low 30s to 22 C. Already it almost feels like an autumn evening. The holiday weekend will be much cooler, but at least some of it will be sunny, and it will be much more pleasant than the oppressive heat and humidity we've had all this week.

This year has been very different from any other in our experience. No interesting travels to exotic destinations, just a shut-in time for Wendy with a slow but relentless decline in health and vitality; she sleeps a lot, has no energy, has lost a great deal of weight as her muscles waste away and she has become less and less able to do things for herself. But on the positive side, she has no pain whatever, and her mind is as sharp as ever - even if she has some difficulty telling what day of the week it is. For her, every day is much the same as every other day. Lately her speech has become increasingly difficult to understand, and she has had increasing difficulty articulating her words, because she is losing the nerve supply to the muscles she uses to speak. So I was very pleased indeed to get a phone call today from Margo Butler, the speech language pathologist at the ALS Clinic, to tell us that the speech synthesizing device earmarked for her has arrived. We have an appointment to get accustomed to it, complete the paperwork, etc, first thing on Tuesday morning, after the holiday weekend. This speech synthesizer is a complex electronic device that would cost somewhere between $25K and $30K if we had to buy it. The way the Ontario Health Insurance Plan works is that we get it on loan from an equipment pool for an annual rental fee for as long as we need it. If we program it appropriately, I think Wendy could even use it to send and receive email, but we will find out on Tuesday whether that would be possible with the machine Wendy is getting. Stay tuned for further bulletins on this.